A highlight of this After Dark evening was Thee Oh Sees, one of the Bay Area’s best underground bands, who created a playful aural disorientation while playing in front of “visual music” by the late experimental filmmaker and musicologist Harry Smith.

In this gem from 1990, we get a brief peek into the flourishing mind of German-born composer/sculptor Trimpin, a MacArthur "genius" award winner and the subject of a recent feature documentary. He chronicles his unique adventures through sound and music making, takes audience questions, and stages modified versions of his musical installations in front of the live audience.

Exploratorium staff member Earl Stirling demonstrates the amazing "Pyrograph", an artwork refined over four years. Like a fiery version of the museum’s classic Drawing Board, Stirling’s "Pyrograph" swings a pendulum over a sandy cauldron, tracing out oscillating patterns in colorful fire. This mesmerizing piece evokes both the Foucault pendulum and Dante’s Inferno.

This After Dark event featured a special installation of the Cubatron by Bay Area artist and engineer Mark Lottor. A visually stunning favorite of music and art festival audiences, the Cubatron is a 3–D light sculpture made from 8–x–8-foot modular cubes, each containing 1,000 individually programmable RGB LEDs. Viewed from any direction—even underneath—the Cubatron’s thousands of programmed pixels paint exquisite arrays of color that cascade in spectacularly dynamic patterns.

An introduction to an activity that lets you discover the secret colors hidden in black ink. With a paper towel, a black marker, and a cup of water, create a rainbow of colors while exploring capillary action and chromatography.

Explore the science behind this activity, including capillary action (how the water moves up the paper) and chromatography, or how different elements of the ink are carried along at different rates, allowing you to see that black ink is actually made up of many different colors.

NPR, or Neighborhood Public Radio is an artists collective and community radio project founded in 2004 by multimedia artists and educators Lee Montgomery, Jon Brumit and Michael Trigilio.
Acting as a traveling band of guerilla broadcasters, NPR personnel have hosted thematic broadcasts from San Francisco to Serbia, including a stint at the 2008 Whitney Biennial. What is Neighborhood Public Radio? Imagine a storefront community radio station open to you. You get access to the airwaves regardless of your qualifications or message.
We caught up with the founders of the now-decentralized NPR team, in Oakland, Chicago and San Diego to talk about the technical, social and political aspects of broadcasting, and about their tattoos.
As a special treat for our listeners we thought it would be fun to ask Lee, Jon and Michael to create a new Audio-Art piece for our Podcast series. The idea was simple. They would each create a composition that was no more than 5 minutes long, and we would layer all three parts together to create a single new work. Visit the link at the bottom to hear the results.

Snow Mirror is the first in a series of pieces that celebrate slowness and black and white, in this piece the image of the viewer is created by the congregation and accumulation of white snow flakes in areas of the image that are brighter. The result is projected on a transparent silk fabric which creates a feeling of the flakes being suspended in space. Artist Daniel Rozin will be featured in the Exploratorium's 2009 exhibition, Reflections.

Webcasts made possible through the generosity of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Jim Clark Endowment for Internet Education, the McBean Family Foundation.

Bandwidth and infrastructure support for connectivity to the California Research and Education Network and to other Internet2-connected networks provided by the Corporation for Educational Networks Initiatives in California (CENIC).